Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of Los Angeles native Anthony Hernandez (b.1947), opening Friday, September 15 from 6 to 8. Since the late 1960s, Hernandez’s photographs have revealed with formal integrity and bleak beauty, the harsh realities of his native Los Angeles.
The exhibition is comprised of two of his most critically acclaimed series which have never previously shown in New York: Landscapes for the Homeless and Public Transit. On view September 15 through October 20, Anthony Hernandez coincides with the opening of the artist’s eponymous career retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum which originated in Fall 2016 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Throughout his career, Hernandez has pursued a nuanced view of the physical and social landscape of Los Angeles. In Public Transit, 1979-80, Hernandez switched from a handheld 35mm to a 5 x 7” large format camera and tripod to create a new kind of street photography. Made at bus stops throughout the city, the large-scale black and white photographs capture the isolation of the urban metropolis through formally composed and carefully detailed views of desolate boulevards disappearing into the horizon, peopled only by the Los Angeles underclass waiting for the next bus.
Jeff Wall, in his essay for the 2009 monographic exhibition he curated on Hernandez at the Vancouver Art Museum, relates the new approach of the Public Transit work to that of emerging Americans Stephen Shore and Robert Adams and the Germans Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky.